The display split.
On the left was the live surgical recording from yesterday morning at seven-fifteen: my abdomen, opened via three keyhole incisions, my native kidneys glowing healthy, pink, and completely untouched under the cold operating theater lights.
On the right was the private suite on the sixth floor—the **Adelaide Vance-Bromel Intensive Care Pavilion**, paid for by a two-million-dollar tax-deductible endowment from the Sterling-Vance Foundation.
Inside that darkened room, monitored by four private security guards wearing the discreet lapel pins of **Valkyrie Special Operations**, Adelaide Bromel lay beneath an unyielding mechanical ventilator. Her aristocratic face, usually taut with six figures of cosmetic surgery and forty years of dynastic supremacy, was an apocalyptic, mottled shade of bruised plum and necrotic gray.
The organ sitting in her iliac fossa—the organ Thaddius Bromel believed had been cut out of my living body twenty-four hours ago—was dying.
It had turned black forty-five minutes after the vascular clamps were released.
